Personally, I prefer blackwalls on dog dishes or redlines on black steelies, but some folks out there dig whitewalls. Ryan Cochran did, enough to write an article for the first issue of Hot Rod Deluxe, back around 1999, including interviews with Barris and Roth. He shared his article in a recent post on the H.A.M.B., along with a never-before-published sidebar to the history.

Coincidentally, I did a bit of research a while ago – never enough for a full story – about the transition from white tires to black tires sometime in the 1910s or 1920s. I was able to identify Binney & Smith, the creators of Crayola crayons, as the company that discovered that black rubber wore longer than white rubber, but I could never pin down any dates. Nor could I link that transition to the appearance of whitewalls. Hmmm….